For instance, maybe you think our current tax rules are bad, but perhaps you'd like the ability to have and enforce any tax rules at all, even when some of your fellow citizens disagree with you about what rules are ideal.
I think income taxes are dumb. Instead I think taxation should begin with Pigovian taxes on negative externalities, then if more money is needed Georgist taxes on supply-inelastic factors, and then finally if the government somehow needs even MORE money it should resort to consumption taxes like VATs and stop there. Does this method inhibit the ability to collect those?
Pregnancy is certainly costly (and the abnormally high miscarriage rate appears to be an attempt to save on such costs in case anything has gone wrong), but it's not that fatal (for the mother). A German midwife recorded one maternal death out of 350 births.
Forager societies didn't have below-replacement fertilities, which are now common for post-industrial societies.
Having children wasn't a paying venture, but people had kids anyway for the same reason other species expend energy on offspring.
It seems odd for mitochondria to be causing the mutation problem sex is supposed to solve, when mitochondria themselves don't reproduce sexually.
Restricting mitochondria reproduction to one mating "type" does not by itself prevent a "selfish" mitochondria from arriving. If one mitochondria develops a new mutation, it is now competing against all the other mitochondria in that same organism without the mutation (like a cancer). But in fact the restriction goes beyond merely the "type", as all the somatic cells are dead-ends for mitochondria.
Robin Hans...
I would have contributed... if I hadn't been required to use Paypal. I closed my account a while back.
By 2011, Hanson concedes at least somewhat to Yudkowsky's position and states that Cyc might not have enough information or be in the wrong format (FOOM, 496).
I looked for it on that page, but instead it's on 497 (second-to-last numbered paragraph), where he says:
4. The AI system Eliezer most respects for its promising architecture is eurisko. Its author, Doug Lenat, concluded from it that our main obstacle is not architecture but mental content—the more one knows, the faster one can learn. Lenat’s new Cyc system has much content, though it still doesn’t learn fast. Cyc might not have enough content yet, or perhaps Lenat sought the wrong content or format.
I went to his account via a different link here and found this:
https://twitter.com/DoomsdayDebunks/status/1471204307609477123
which links to this:
https://twitter.com/SetteLab/status/1469007626306392064
Immigration and clustering people together seems to have been key to the success of various intellectual hubs throughout history, like the Bay Area recently, Vienna in the 20th century, and Edinburgh in the 18th century
Was there really that much immigration in 18th century Edinburgh? And in terms of agglomeration, I'm sure it was denser than, say, the highlands of Scotland, was it really that much compared to other cities in Britain?
The blogger "Education Realist" disagrees with the argument that flat scores show that spending more on education hasn't resulted in any improvements. He argues that if you divide students up demographically, we have seen improvements. It's just that the shift in the composition of the student population masks that.
I tend to dismiss Steven Landsburg's critique of the standard interpretation of experiments along the lines of the Ultimatum Game, since nobody really thinks it through like him. But I actually did think about it when taking this survey (which is not the same as saying it affected my response).
I thought #3 was the definition of "agent", which I suppose is why it got that label. #1 sounds a little like birds confronted by cuckoo parasitism, which Eliezer might call "sphexish" rather than agenty.
...2: An outside view works best when using a reference class with a similar causal structure to the thing you're trying to predict. An inside view works best when a phenomenon's causal structure is well-understood, and when (to your knowledge) there are very few phenomena with a similar causal structure that you can use to predict things about the phenomenon you're investigating. See: The Outside View's Domain.
When writing a textbook that's much like other textbooks, you're probably best off predicting the cost and duration of the project by looking at simi
Robin was one of the people initially impressed with Ryan & Jetha, later persuaded by Saxon in "Dusk".
I personally recommend Azar Gat's "War in Human Civilization" as much more sweeping than Keeley's book. Despite the title, it's range precedes civilization, and even the emergence of humanity (although those are smaller portions of the book near the beginning). My posts about it are here. At any rate, there seems to be substantial evidence for warfare (or at least something analogous to "gang war" given their social scale)...
I don't like the idea of being labeled a "political blogger" (I don't think I wrote anything about the election or its run-up), but it's hard to deny that politics is discussed a lot at my blog and I don't really have any other forte I could claim to displace it. I could defend myself by linking to Razib Khan on how many of the "science" blogs on his old blogroll spend most of their time discussing politics (generally, politically inflected atheism), but for one who accepts "politics is the mind-killer" that's just a "but...
I appreciate the hat-tip, but you might have wanted to link to the more thorough explication of that chapter from Collins' book, which Hanson discussed here.
EDIT: Some of what you quoted is in my comment you linked originally, and not in my follow-up post. Hope nobody got confused when they weren't able to find those quotes.
"In any case, 55% is pretty conservative; it means I consider myself to have almost no information." I'm wondering what evidence there is for a probability above 50. That's what I would consider "conservative". It's not literally "no information", it's "no more information than the median voter". That's what it would mean for your vote to affect the outcome in a positive manner. Conditional on your vote affecting the outcome, there must be as many people (in your area) for one candidate as the other. The more lopside...
The cold hard utilitarian calculus is hard in many cases because it aims to maximize rather than satisfice. In many ways that seems a feature rather than a bug. Deontological ethics tend to rely heavily on the act-omission distinction, which I must admit I would prefer as the bar I have to pass. But if, as Kant suggested, I ask how I would prefer others to behave, I would want them to act to increase utility. From a contractarian perspective, we can indicate to others that we will increase their utility if they increase ours. It's hard to make contracts wi...
I actually thought this argument was quite poor. There are lots of possible features in different cases of a type, and to claim some are vitally important seems to beg the question. Murdering a homeless loner estranged from any family or friends may lack many of the features mentioned, but there's little dispute it would qualify. And preventing the creation of a new life prevents the relationships that person would eventually develop. Pointing out that an example falls into a commonly understood category seems a pretty good starting point before delving in...
And preventing the creation of a new life prevents the relationships that person would eventually develop.
Really? An appeal to counterfactual consequences? By this line of reasoning, each day you're not having sex with the intent to procreate is tantamount to murder, starting from the moment you hit puberty until you're no longer fertile. There are no remaining schelling points in-between, AFAICT. All that remains is cold hard utilitarian multiplication. Cold hard utilitarian multiplication is, well, hard - and it might not agree with you.
...My preferr
McCarthy was being fed info from J. Edgar Hoover, who did have access to the Venona transcripts. I don't know if he was given the identities of known spies, but he was sent after Hoover's bureaucratic rivals.
The poor also commit significantly more non-lucrative crime.
I found your top-level post hard to understand at first. You may want to add a clearer introduction. When I saw "The issue in brief", I expected a full sentence/thesis to follow and had to recheck to see if I overlooked a verb.
I'm somewhat similar. I'm pretty easily satisfied and right now don't feel any discomfort pushing me toward change. LW is interesting entertainment. I continued reading it when it split from OB, but I never had interest in self-improvement or saving the world. I lack "something to protect" as Eliezer put it.
A while back somebody I had done a favor gave me a deal on a used bass guitar. I figured since it had four strings it should be easy to learn, but I didn't put that much effort into it. Almost two years later and I never even learned to get a consistent sound out of one note and I'm about to sell it (for a profit of course).
If higher IQ is almost always better, why the bell curve? Short people persist because height can have costs.
It's not hard to find evidence that IQ can be fitness reducing.
There was a cognitive scientist at Mixing Memory who had a skeptical take of some of Lakoff's views on metaphors and was doing a chapter-by-chapter analysis of one of his books, but then he disappeared off the face of the internet. Still have no idea what happened to him, shame if he died without presumably signing up for cryonics.
Isn't there a rule of Bayesianism that you shouldn't be able to anticipate changing your mind in a predictable manner, but rather you should just update right now?
Perhaps rather than asking will you enter or leave the simulation it might be better to start with a person inside it, remove them from it, and then ask them if they want to go back.
Tyler regularly disagrees with his colleagues. If he were one of them he might think to himself "Alex is the best truth-tracker, so I should check what he thinks on the issue", but Tyler doesn't regard truth as something to optimize for.